ABUJA, (Reuters) – Nigeria’s ruling party candidate Bola Tinubu has an unassailable lead in a disputed presidential election held over the weekend, a Reuters tally of provisional results from all 36 states and the federal capital Abuja showed on Tuesday.
Tinubu of the governing All Progressives Congress (APC) of outgoing president Muhammadu Buhari got about 35% of the vote, or 8.2 million votes, followed by Atiku Abubakar of the main opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP), who took a 30% share, or 6.9 million votes.
Peter Obi of the Labour Party, an outsider popular with the youth and educated voters, got 26% of the vote, or about 6.1 million votes.
Nigerian electoral law says a candidate can win just by getting more votes than their rivals, provided they get 25% of the vote in at least two-thirds of the 36 states and Abuja, which Tinubu also managed to do.
Tinubu’s potential victory extends the APC’s grip on power in Africa’s top oil producer and most populous nation, though he inherits a litany of problems from Buhari.
Nigeria is struggling with Islamist insurgencies in the northeast, armed attacks, killings and kidnappings, conflict between livestock herders and farmers, cash, fuel and power shortages and perennial corruption that opponents say Buhari’s party has failed to stamp out, despite promises to do so.
Opposition parties rejected the results as the product of a flawed process, which suffered multiple technical difficulties owing to the introduction of new technology by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and on Tuesday called on its chairman Mahmood Yakubu to resign.
Tinubu asked voters to elect him on his track record during his two terms as Lagos state governor at the turn of the century, during which he managed to reduce violent crime, improve the city’s traffic jams and clean up rubbish.
The 70-year-old has, however, sometimes appeared frail in public, slurring his speech and answering questions with platitudes, and skipping several campaign events, leaving some to doubt how effective he would be.
Obi’s campaign attracted young people and urban, more educated voters fed up with corrupt politics of the past, the two parties that have represented it since the end of military rule in 1999 and old men who have tended to dominate them.
Both the PDP and the Labour Party as well as the smaller opposition ADC rejected the results.
“The results being declared at the National Collation centre have been heavily doctored and manipulated and do not reflect the wishes of Nigerians expressed at the polls,” they said in a joint statement.
INEC rejected the call.
“There are laid down procedures for aggrieved parties or candidates to follow when they are dissatisfied about the outcome of an election,” it said in a statement.
“Such procedures do not include calling on the INEC Chairman to resign or for the election to be cancelled.”
INEC officers in Rivers State, the capital of Africa’s biggest oil industry, had initially suspended the announcement of results after state collation officer Charles Adias received death threats via text message.
“When there are crises in the polling unit, the attack is on my phone that I am responsible. When BVAS (voter identification machines) fail to function, the attack is equally on my phone that I am responsible,” Adias told journalists.
In the capital Abuja, the INEC had said it would resume collating results at 9 p.m. (2000 GMT), and may declare a winner overnight.
The election was also marred by violence in places, although seemingly not yet on the scale of previous ones.
The INEC had promised to upload results directly from each polling unit to its website but most were unable to do so immediately, and thousands had yet to be uploaded by 7:45 p.m.(1845 GMT) on Tuesday.
That meant results had to be collated manually inside ward and local government counting centres as in previous polls, problems observer missions also criticised as the result of poor planning.
There are fears frustrations over the process could boil over into violence.
In a normally bustling market on Lagos island earlier on Tuesday, one of the most densely populated places in Africa, shops were shut and streets deserted in the morning.
